Idolator
Since many people find it hard to tell the great from the godawful when it comes to 21st-century mainstream rock, welcome to "Corporate Rock Still Sells," where Al Shipley (a.k.a. Idolator commenter GovernmentNames) examines what's good, bad, and ugly in the world of Billboard's rock charts. In the first installment, he takes a look at the current state of modern rock radio, a format that he argues is healthier than most will give it credit for:
It might seem like an odd idea to have anyone explain the state of something as commonplace as rock radio, but in the indie-centric blogosphere, you can't assume prior knowledge about popular music that escapes the Hype Machine's gaze. Even in the critical community at large, where pretty much any populist genre (country, Radio Disney, ringtone rap) gets its share of respect and scrutiny from a dedicated gaggle of writers, mainstream rock is just about the only significant slice of the SoundScan pie that gets dismissed across the board without a second thought. (Possibly because those other stabs at populism came out of attempts to banish the bogeyman known as "rockism.") One of the seeds for this column was planted while playing corporate-rock apologist in response to Maura's potshot at the Modern Rock Top 10, which looked to me to be a hell of a lot better than the chart's been at most points in the past five years. And I don't care what anyone says, "Bleed It Out" (see above) and "Paralyzer" (see below) are fucking catchy songs.
Despite the persistence of faceless nu-grunge merchants like Seether, the chart is fairly diverse at the moment: Warped Tour insurgents (Paramore), pretentious British art-rock (Muse), hoarse-throated orthodox punk (Against Me!), and the perennially critic-friendly White Stripes have all staked out real estate on the current Top 20. Bands with grass-roots followings and indie origins are all over the radio—just not the kind of grass-roots followings and indie origins that get Pitchfork love, for the most part. But these bands all play loud, guitar-heavy rock music that sounds good on FM frequencies, which hasn't been a big part of the indie zeitgeist for a long, long time. For once, mainstream and underground rock are mutually exclusive, as much for musical reasons as for any kind of indie loathing of the mainstream. There's still some indie crossover happening on the radio waves, but it's mostly on sleepy triple-A stations.
Back around the turn of the century, the relative health of rock radio was popular debate fodder for music fans everywhere, but nowadays even its detractors seem to have lost some of their passion for the argument. The endless cycle of "rock is dead!"/"rock is back!" trend pieces that accompanied every major event in the rock press (Radiohead "abandoning" guitars, the Strokes-led garage rock revival, etc.) seem to have run their course, with hip-hop fans now picking up the torch to argue endlessly about whether their beloved genre can be dead despite all evidence to the contrary. It's a foregone conclusion that mainstream rock sucks. Granted, that assumption's frequently right. But it's probably wrong more often than you think.
Recently, Billboard brought back the Top Rock Albums chart that it had discontinued in 1984, which might be seen as an acknowledgment that rock music is as marginalized as it's been in the last 23 years. Which still isn't that marginalized, though: the bottom album on the Album Rock chart's Top 10 is at No. 32 on the big chart, which means that roughly a third of the most popular albums of the country are still rock music, at least by Billboard's somewhat inconsistent definition of the genre. Guitar rock doesn't rule the monoculture like it once did—and it never will again—but the media's no longer in a panic about it. Rock's big unit-shifters of recent years have been, for the most par, VH1-friendly balladeers of all stripes, from Maroon 5 to Nickelback, and TRL-beloved emo-not-emo phenoms like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance. Not exactly the kinds of bands that folks like Jann Wenner would feel great about grooming for eventual canonization in Cleveland, but not as difficult for them to embrace with a straight face as Limp Bizkit or Creed were when they were running shit a few years ago.
But even now, with thoroughly 21st-century mediocrity like Linkin Park ruling rock radio, the format is clearly living in the shadow of the '90s. Although plenty of bands have tried, and failed, to maintain or regain the relevance they enjoyed a decade ago (paging Billy Corgan), those that have succeeded now get to be big fish in a slightly smaller pond. Bands that made more music in the '90s—and for the most part were more popular then, too—have enjoyed most of their No. 1 singles on the Modern Rock chart since 2000. Eight of Red Hot Chilli Peppers' 11 chart toppers, half of Green Day's eight, four of the Foo Fighters' five, and all four of Nine Inch Nails' were racked up in this decade. Perhaps it's just a less competitive field than it used to be, or perhaps aging program directors will add anything with name recognition to their playlists en masse just to keep Three Days Grace at bay.
The prevailing wisdom is that Modern Rock radio had its glory days, and they're long gone by now. But looking at lists of '90s chart-toppers just reminds me that there was always a lot of horrible, horrible bullshit clogging up those stations' playlists. There was no sudden downhill slide set in motion by Staind, or Sugar Ray, or even Bush. And only once we free ourselves from the rose-colored glasses of the Nirvana era can we crank up our local rock station and enjoy the good—or channel-surf past the bad.
Comments
Well done, sir!
Watching the Linkin Park video, I was impressed by the band's stage presence and energy (I felt the same way seeing them as part of Live 8). At the same time, the song's is pretty much a rewrite of NIN's "Gave Up" with a stronger band dynamic. In the same way, the only thing really catchy about "Paralyzer" is the "Take Me Out" stomp of the hook.
Corporate rock always jumps on too late and holds on too long to the earlier "indie" trends, but if the future faceless groups are gonna be aping Arcade Fire or "Kid A" Radiohead (looknig at you, Mute Math), I think it's about time to call a code on "modern rock".
Very nicely written, Al. Particularly in pointing out the indie-rock-centrism of the blogosphere, a trend that most of the perpetrators seem to be oblivious to. Also worth noting is the coast-centric attitude that kind of comes along with it.
paralyzer = moneymaker?
I admit it's a weird critical blind spot that I tend to tune out a lot of mainstream "modern rock" while dorking out severely over its pre-punk '70s equivalent -- and I bet I'm probably missing out on some modern-day answer to Blue Oyster Cult or the Sweet in the process.
@Halfwit: You're not wrong, both the songs I highlighted represent their own aesthetic dead ends (although I like "Paralyzer" way more than "Take Me Out," mainly because of the vague 80's vibe of the verses that reminds me of, I don't know, Don Henley's "Dirty Laundry" or something like that). My defense for a lot of the stuff I praise here is going to be more "lowered expectations" than "guilty pleasure": if it has so much as a hot riff, I'll stump for it. If I was going to make a case for the best song on rock radio right now, I'd go with "Misery Business," but there's already been plenty of Paramore advocacy on this site.
@Vince Neilstein:
Yeah, milquetoast indie does dominate the blogs (if nothing else). But, as Al says, they also boast career-track advocates for D4L and Girls Aloud, and those people tend to write more intelligently. As a genre with almost no serious online apoligists, gloomy frat-rock stands pretty much alone. (Unless you count college newspaper websites.)
The stuff has little for me but awful deja vu. But I'll take any "Modern Rock" chart without a token ska track. Good riddance, '90s.
@GovernmentNames: That's a dangerous path, though, because it doesn't translate to any further interest (or, more importantly, revenue). My not turning the knob doesn't mean that I'm going to every pay anything towards the band (album, mp3, or concert ticket). Also, the "lowered expectations" angle means that we can basically forget about the "20 years later" critical redemption. Where are the 21st Century Journeys? ELO, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you...
Welcome to the fray, Al!
If this becomes a regular feature, you should take a stab at dissecting the gradual convergence of Billboard's Modern Rock and Active Rock (formerly Album Rock) charts. I used to be able to tell the difference -- one would play new music by Boomer-rock icons, one wouldn't -- but now I don't know what Active Rock's reason for existing is. I believe Foo Fighters' "The Pretender" is No. 1 on both charts this week.
Billboard seems to all but acknowledge the pointlessness -- in the magazine each week, they always run the Modern Rock chart, but I believe Active only appears on their website.
@DHMBIB: @GovernmentNames: Sorry for my lame "first post!"-inspired comment earlier...
At the turn of the millenium and into 2003 or so, I spent a lot of time chaufering my tween/teenage nieces. They were really into Top 40 radio, and I can't really recall ever hearing any rock music on the radio. During that era, Top 40 radio was completely dominated by hip hop and urban artists such as [in no particular order here] Usher, Nelly, Lil' Jon, Petey Pablo, Eminem, 50 Cent, Blu Cantrell, Jay-Z, Sean Paul, Ludacris, and so on [memo to self: find out wherever Lil' Jon crunked his way to, call him, thank him for being gone, and ask him not to come back]. I only rarely would hear Creed or Linkin Park. And I can't even name any other significant rock artists from that era.
It took some mighty titanic work by Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Outkast, and Gwen Stefani to eject Lil' Jon [that guy was everywhere] and his friends from the airwaves and pave the way for the sound of Top 40 radio we hear today.
Big windup there, but the point was that I wasn't hearing rock anywhere at the time. Then 2003/04-ish, I started DJ'ing at bars, and readers here may or may not know that most "bars" that are not specifically targeting non-White customers are owned by and managed by people who absolutely freakin' hate the type of music I listed above with every bone in their bodies and never allow it to be played [those guys also luvz them some Jimmy Buffett and Motown and "classic rock" and assume that everyone else in the world luvz it too]. But not everyone who goes out to a bar these days is so genre-limited, so I started getting requests for all kinds of new [or newly-popular] and developing artists such as Lifehouse, Finger Eleven, Yellowcard, Nickleback, Evanescence, the Strokes, White Stripes, The Darkness, Jet, and later as MySpace and other communities started bubbling newer music to the top, Arctic Monkeys, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and so on. There's some dreck in that list too, for sure, but at least it gave me something to play [and hear] besides the Rolling Stones and Journey.
I think I'll end my rambling now.
Oh yeah -- do you have any idea how hard it is to make up a playlist that includes [among others] FOB, Journey, Nickelbak, Fergie, Gwen, Beyonce, Justin, Jet, Avril, Bob Marley, Jimmy Buffett, the Allman Brothers, Madonna, U2, 80's, Michael Jackson, Prince, and somehow make it sorta work?
@dennisobell: Thanks, Chris. Good call with comparing and contrasting Modern Rock and Active Rock formats, that's definitely something I plan on digging deeper into in the future, partly because my local Active station plays way more new music than the Modern one. Does Billboard even have an Active Rock chart, or do you mean the one called Mainstream Rock?
ironic that the title of the post lifts lyrics from a band -- the ramones -- that was perpetually locked out of the singles chart no matter how hard they tried (e.g. not even the phil specter-produced "end of the century," a great album, could break them). good bands always go unnoticed.
i have no doubt there are plenty of modern-day ELO's and Journeys on the charts right now, but it'll be two decades before critics and progressive listeners (for lack of a better word to describe the overly conscious, indie-loving music blogger) will admit to liking them...and then only in a "guilty pleasure" context.
@GovernmentNames: Sorry! You're being polite, but I fucked up: "Active Rock" is the industry name for the radio format, but Billboard's chart is indeed named "Mainstream Rock Tracks." My bad.
Yea some of those songs are good, but it's still sad that to be considered "mainstream" a band has to be on a major label. Indie-inspired is ok but not indie. Spoon can be on Saturday Night Live and sell a fair amount of cds but not be on commercial FM radio. Ever since radio programming guru Lee Abrams began formatting previously free-form radio back in the late '70s mainstream rock radio formatting has been overly narrow.
Probably 75% of the music played on the local "Modern Rock" station (I'm in Charlotte) is from the 90s... seriously, do I really have to listen to Black Hole Sun? Again? The remaining 25% is a combination of Fall Out Boy, Breaking Benjamin, Nickelback, and 30 Seconds to Mars. DREADFUL (as is the state of Charlotte radio in general...).
Modern rock radio will be alive for as long as men in their late '20s and early '30s are listening to it, even when they're the only ones left listening to it, because radio stations can charge an ass-load for jewelry store commercials geared towards people buying engagement rings. That's literally all that's keeping my local modern-rock station afloat the past two or three years.
Saying fuck in that sentence almost convinced me that those songs would be good, but then I listened to them and realized you have dismal standards.
Still-- congrats on effective use of swears!
Comment on this post
Reply by EmailLogin with your username and password below. Or comment on this post via email.
Forgot your username or password? New User?